The Era of Big Government is Back

Not that it ever went away.

Dan Froomkin (White House Briefing) surveys the fall-out from Bush's national address last night.

But the guts of the speech -- in which Bush unfurled his administration's grand plans for the biggest government-funded reconstruction effort in history -- has led to considerable skepticism, if not outright puzzlement, on both sides of the political divide.

Consider two of the more extreme possibilities:

* Either Bush is being entirely forthright, in which case he's talking about something reminiscent of the biggest liberal government programs of the 20th century. That scares some conservatives, certainly fiscal conservatives, to death.
* Or maybe it's just a plan to transform the Gulf Coast into a big test bed for conservative social policy, where tax breaks flow to big business and tax money flows to Halliburton, churches and private schools. That utterly terrifies liberals.

Out of all the people he quotes, Tucker Carlson says it best:

"The principal that people are poor because they're discriminated against and the federal government can set that right by social spending . . . is a liberal idea. . . . This is what liberals say -- it's not at all what conservatives say -- and the conservatives watching the speech tonight who noticed that line are sitting bolt upright right now and thinking, did I just hear him say that? . . ."Conservatives don't believe that. And to hear a purportedly conservative president say that is unprecedented. . . . And I
think it's going to annoy the hell out of his base."